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Ontario workers buoyed by U.S. minimum wage hikes

A $14 minimum wage in Ontario doesn’t seem like much when some American workers are winning $15 minimum wages

Sterling Harders, a union organizer in the Seattle, Wash., area, helped non-unionized airport workers in the community of SeaTac win a $15 minimum wage in a November municipal referendum. (Copyright 2012 Jay Dotson)

In nearby Seattle, newly elected Mayor Ed Murray, whose platform included a $15 minimum wage, is boosting municipal worker wages and has appointed a panel to study the impact of extending the move citywide.

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“When we started this fight for a living wage a year ago, folks said $15 is too big a reach,” said SEIU union organizer Sterling Harders, a member of Working Washington, which supported the SeaTac campaign.

“But what we’ve seen in the last year is that public opinion about this really changed,” she said in a telephone interview from Seattle earlier this week.

Harders will be among several American labour activists in Toronto on Friday evening for a forum to encourage Ontario workers to keep up their fight for a $14 minimum wage.

Ontario’s minimum wage has been frozen at $10.25 for four years, allowing inflation to drive full-time earnings 25 per cent below the poverty line, said Deena Ladd, of the Worker’s Action Centre, which is sponsoring the forum.

At $14, a single person working 35 hours a week would be able to earn about 10 per cent above the poverty line, she said. The poverty line is about $23,000 for a single person, before taxes, in Ontario.

“People deserve to be able to go to work, pay their bills and have a decent quality of life,” Ladd said. “It is not something just for CEOs of corporations.”

“We have a lot to learn about what’s happening in the States and the kind of organizing that they are doing to challenge the path of bad jobs and poor wages,” she added.

Rotating strikes by fast-food workers across the U.S. last year and two Seattle mayoral candidates who championed a $15 minimum wage drew public attention to stagnating wages and the impact on workers’ lives, Harders said of the Washington state campaign.

“Folks are starting to understand raising minimum wages to $15 an hour is not incredible. It’s reasonable. And it’s what people need to be able to get by,” she said. “They also understand that to put our economy back on track we need to put money in the hands of people who will spend it.”

About 6,000 workers are covered by the SeaTac city ordinance, which also grants them paid sick leave, tip fairness and other job protection. But so far, only the hotel and rental company workers are benefiting because Alaska Airlines and other large airport employers are fighting the move in court, Harders noted.

Chicago fast-food worker Janah Bailey, who participated in four city-wide strikes of fast-food and retail workers last year as part of Chicago’s Fight for 15 campaign, is also attending the Friday forum.

“Hopefully our experience and our story can continue to encourage (Ontario workers) to speak up and speak out,” she said from Chicago. The minimum wage in Illinois is $8.25.

“When we talk about the fight for $15, we’re talking about families that are behind and who depend on these workers,” said Bailey, 21, who earns between $10,000 and $12,000 a year. She is the main breadwinner for her family: two younger sisters and a mother who is too ill to work.

“We want workers in Ontario to know they are not alone and that we are with them,” she added.

Minimum wages in the U.S. are set by cities, states and the federal government. Washington state’s is one of the highest and is indexed to inflation. On Thursday, a state lawmaker introduced a bill to increase it further to $12 within three years.

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